Define Your Location-Based Marketing Goals

If you follow best marketing practices, you’ll start every campaign with a strategic brief. Starting with a brief applies to location-based marketing, just as it does to traditional marketing.

The brief describes important things like the product or service, the idea for the campaigns, the audience and its demographic breakdown (and perhaps some information on audience behavior), the challenges faced in making the idea come to life, the hurdles to overcoming the challenges, and the resources allocated..

This is still marketing and not magic. It is, however, fun stuff that can inspire you to do some very cool and creative things to target your audiences at the right time and place.

Write your brief in reverse order. Start by asking yourself, What do I want the audience to do? Stating explicit goals for your campaign and location in your campaign allows you to create within a series of constraints:

Location: This is a very broad topic, and constraining your team by what you want to achieve initially can help you decide what platforms are necessary to execute your campaign. In other words, platforms can often be determined by the constraints of the campaign.

Goals: Base your goals on the kinds of activities you want to inspire. The most obvious goal is to get someone to check in to your establishment. But goals can be other things, like attaining a certain frequency of check-ins, specials unlocked, specials taken advantage of, items unlocked, or badges earned — and, of course, the revenue associated with the specials.

Location-based social networks can help you achieve any of the following things, all of which are worthwhile goals:

Entice a new customer into your business.

Reward someone with a prize or a badge.

Create a competitive atmosphere for people around businesses they’re passionate about.

Build loyalty for a business or brand.

If you’re not sure which location-based service to use for a campaign, you can test multiple providers to discover which service does the best for a certain type of campaign. The most important thing to remember with a test is that you should keep some variables constant across the test so you track the impact of changing a variable.

Variables can include the platform, the offer, the location, the promotion money spent (yes, putting paid media behind a location-based campaign is essential), the frequency of earned media messages on Facebook, and the Twitter account used to promote the campaign.